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Slow history and the mysterious 20th century

MENCIUS MOLDBUG · SEPTEMBER 30, 2010

As any Alice Waters devotee will tell you, one heirloom Arkansas Black
picked by eye and plucked by hand, wiped on your shirt and bitten in a
single motion, weighs more than a climate-controlled tractor-trailer
full of Red Delicious. It’s the same with history.Slow food is easy to find
these days. Slow history—not so much.

There is nothing intrinsically foul about commercial bulk apples.Theoretically, a mechanical system could be constructed that grew
Arkansas Blacks in Chile, scanned their peels with machine vision and
sniffed them with gas spectrometers, picked them at their perfect peak,
and transferred them immediately to ballistic launchers that sent them
arcing, cushioned and heated, through space to the Safeway in Walnut
Creek. Could this super space apple be just as good as the one you just
picked? Why not? In practice, however, a commercial apple travels
through far more mundane processing steps, each of which does its small
part to reduce fruit to flavored styrofoam.

Consider Franklin D. Roosevelt. Like Red Delicious apples, information
about the first president of USG 4 is not in short supply. But what is
the quality of this information? Who has processed, filtered, packed and
shipped it?

Just as Chilean space apples would eliminate our need for slow food, a
time machine—even one which could only observe—would eliminate our
need for slow history. Suppose some physicist could plant a retroactive
bug on FDR, so that we could hear everything “that man” said from 1933
to 1944. Would the 20th century have any secrets left? Not many, I
suspect.

As it turns out, we actually have 8 hours of FDR tapes. These were made
inadvertently,
so they are of the highest historical quality—like the time-machine
bug, not processed for any audience. Here is the real FDR.

That was not a Red Delicious apple. Can you taste the difference? You
can, can’t you?

Even the difference between the actual audio and a mere transcript
matters, for interesting
things can happen between the tree and the hand. (If you’re curious
about John Dean and the true history of Watergate, I strongly recommend
this
work despite its slightly overstated title.)

Hence slow history. The student of slow history, who has no faith at all
in consensus wisdom, official truth, and “everybody knows” chestnuts,
is willing to rest enormous judgments on a single, indisputable,
authentic primary source.

For instance, when I state that US foreign policy in the 20th century is
historically rooted in post-millennial Protestant theology, I can link
directly to my favorite primary source—this
TIME
Magazine article from 1942.

It is simply a fact that in 1942, TIME’s writers and its readers knew
what a “super-protestant” foreign policy was, because it is a fact
that this article was written, edited, and read. It could have been
inserted in the TIME archive by crafty anti-Protestant hackers, or for
that matter by aliens, but the student of history need not give these
fantasies much weight. And without them, globalist foreign policy is the
work of “organized U.S. Protestantism.” Believe it or not, the
YMCA is an important
actor in the period. Now, it might be that some even more sinister group
was behind the “Y”—the aliens, the Jews, the Ogpu, etc.—but when
we write the YMCA out of 20th-century history, we are writing bad
history. And I can prove it, because I have that link.

Today I want to perform another such feat of “slow history.” I’ll be
explaining the entire 20th century from a few fragments of text in the
diaries of Ulrich
von Hassell. I do not read German, so I am subject to the translator’s
whim, and of course one never knows what has been done to a document
before it hits the presses. Aliens, Jews, government historians, etc.,
could be involved. But still, my trust in this document is only slightly
lower than in the TIME archives. And these diaries are diaries, so not
written directly for publication.

I trust the author, too. In my view, there is no group or faction
without blame in the tremendous tragedy of World War II. But it is
widely acknowledged that some of the most meritorious actors were the
aristocratic German nationalists of the
July 20 plot, and so
far as it goes I agree with this consensus—which certainly fits my own
ideology. Hassell, a German diplomat of the best breeding and education,
was picked as the Foreign Minister of the post-Hitler Germany. After
Hitler survived Tom Cruise’s bomb, Hassell was naturally shot, but his
diaries were in a safe place. He comes about as close as possible to the
stereotype of the “good German,” and his diaries display a cultivation
and clarity rare in any era. They are far superior to the
Ciano diaries, and
the Ciano diaries are pretty good.

Hassell, who occupied no position of serious responsibility during the
war (the Nazis, not being entirely stupid, did not trust him) was
extremely well plugged-in to diplomatic reality across the New Order. For instance, his information on the Holocaust is excellent. December
1942, p. 277:

Frauendorfer, SS man and wearer of the gold Party badge, was most
impressive in his boundless despair about all he had lived through in
Poland. It was so terrible that he could not endure it. Now he wants to
go to the front as a simple soldier. Continual, indescribable mass
murder of Jews. SS people rode around in the ghetto after the curfew
hour for Jews and used automatic pistols on anybody who was still out,
for example, children who lingered playing in the streets.

May 15, 1943, p. 302:

Shocking reports come from the good Frauendorfer in Poland. While Frank
publicly declares he wanted to give Poland a dignified and free
existence… the SS in Poland carries on most shamefully. Countless
Jews have been gassed in specially built chambers, at least
100,000… Meanwhile the unhappy remnants of the Jews prepared to
defend themselves, and there is heavy fighting which will certainly lead
to their complete extermination by the SS. It is Hitler’s achievement
that the German has become the most loathed animal in the whole world.

Sorry, Nazis. This is hardly the only or
even the best attestation of the
Holocaust; what
it shows is simply that in 1943, Hassell through his social contacts was
(a) aware of this tightly held military secret, and (b) reports it both
correctly and conservatively.

But there is nothing surprising here. The mysterious 20th century? Comrades, we understand the 20th century completely! After all, we just
lived through it, didn’t we? And the good guys won, and good guys tell
the truth. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Did the good guys win? The guys who lost were certainly bad. But there
is a leap of logic here. We certainly have a lot of facts about the 20th
century; here is one we have that Hassell didn’t. My first ellipsis
above conceals a rather interesting error. Let me restore it:

Shocking reports come from the good Frauendorfer in Poland. While Frank
publicly declares he wanted to give Poland a dignified and free
existence, and while the gang tries in vain to befuddle world
opinion about the Katyn murders, the SS in Poland carries on most
shamefully. Countless Jews have been gassed in specially built chambers,
at least 100,000…

Hassell, one breath before accurately reporting the Holocaust, is
completely suckered by Allied propaganda. He quite naturally assumes
that Goebbels (“the gang”) is lying here as well.
In fact, if you were a student of history at any time before 1950, and
you wanted to know the truth about Katyn, your only choice was the
Ministry
of Public Enlightenment.

In the United States, a similar line was taken, notwithstanding that two
official intelligence reports into the Katyn massacre were produced that
contradicted the official position. In 1944 Roosevelt assigned his
special emissary to the Balkans, Navy Lieutenant Commander George Earle,
to produce a report on Katyn. Earle concluded that the massacre was
committed by the Soviet Union.

Having consulted with Elmer Davis, the director of the Office of War
Information, Roosevelt rejected the conclusion (officially), declared
that he was convinced of Nazi Germany’s responsibility, and ordered that
Earle’s report be suppressed. When Earle formally requested permission
to publish his findings, the President issued a written order to desist. Earle was reassigned and spent the rest of the war in American Samoa.

A further report in 1945, supporting the same conclusion, was produced
and stifled. In 1943, two US POWs—Lt. Col. Donald B. Stewart and Col. John H. Van Vliet—had been taken by Germans to Katyn for an
international news conference. Later, in 1945, Van Vliet submitted a
report concluding that the Soviets were responsible for the massacre. His superior, Maj. Gen. Clayton Bissell, Gen. George Marshall’s
assistant chief of staff for intelligence, destroyed the report.

FDR:
accessory
after the fact (at the very least) to genocide. Uncontroversial
consensus history. Scroll back up and listen to the man with the
cigarette holder. Don’t you think he’s capable of it? Americans were
certainly capable of voting for him. “It is Hitler’s achievement that
the German has become the most loathed animal in the entire world.” Collective guilt: not only for Germans.

But why is Ulrich von Hassell fooled? He is anything but a Communist, or
even a liberal. But he knows that (1) murdering Polish intelligentsia
was the policy of the SS, the “black pirates” as he calls them; and
(2) Goebbels is capable of lying about anything. The sins of the Allies
are relatively distant from his mind. The sins of the Nazis obsess and
devour him. Shouldn’t they?

What Ulrich von Hassell is: a traditional European Anglophile diplomat. He can be under no illusions as to the Nazis; he is surrounded by Nazis. But his England is distant and idealized. His America is even more
distant and idealized. The closer to Berlin we get, the more reliable a
time machine we have in Hassell. Farther away, it is his errors that
become interesting.

Here is Hassell on a mystery that remains controversial. July 20, 1943,
p. 312:

There is absolutely no foundation for the assertion that Russia wanted
to attack, or would have attacked later… Russia would never have
attacked Germany, or at least never have attacked successfully, so long
as Germany possessed an unbroken army.

May 27, 1944, p. 345:

An incident which took place recently at the Beuths’ seemed significant
to me. Someone expressed the opinion that we had indeed been forced to
attack Russia, otherwise the Soviets would have attacked us. I burst out
with: “I am absolutely convinced of the contrary!” Whereupon there was
a very obvious, embarrassed, and frightened silence. At last someone
said: “But it would be terrible if you were right!”

What is Hassell talking about? The
Icebreaker
controversy. Briefly, the early events of
Operation
Barbarossa, in which German forces captured enormous Soviet formations
utterly unprepared to defend themselves, are attributed by consensus
historians to Soviet carelessness, incompetence or even naivete. Wikipedia:

In August 1940 British intelligence had received hints of German plans
to attack the Soviets only a week after Hitler informally approved the
plans for Barbarossa. Stalin’s distrust of the British led to his
ignoring the warnings, believing it to be a trick designed to bring the
Soviet Union into the war. In the spring of 1941, Stalin’s own
intelligence services and American intelligence made regular and
repeated warnings of an impending German attack. However, Stalin chose
to ignore these warnings. Although acknowledging the possibility of an
attack in general and making significant preparations, he decided not to
run the risk of provoking Hitler. He also had an ill-founded confidence
in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which had been signed just two years
before.

Despite the Axis failure to achieve Barbarossa’s initial goals, the huge
Soviet losses caused a shift in Soviet propaganda. Before the onset of
hostilities against Germany, the Soviet government had said its army was
very strong. But, by autumn 1941, the Soviet line was that the Red Army
had been weak, that there had not been enough time to prepare for war,
and that the German attack had come as a surprise.

In 1941, Stalin says: Hitler attacked peace-loving, naive, incompetent,
Stalin. In 2010, does the Soviet party line of 1941 ring true to you? It
still rings true to Wikipedia, and to most Western historians. It also
rings true to Ulrich von Hassell—but so did FDR and Stalin’s line on
Katyn. That lie did not hold past the ’50s. But others could have.

Suvorov, whose work I find plausible if not completely overwhelming, has
a different explanation: Soviet forces were defenseless because they
were positioned not for defense, but mobilized for their own surprise
attack, possibly scheduled as little as a few weeks later. Hence, as
Wikipedia puts it:

At the time, 41% of stationary Soviet bases were located in the
near-boundary districts, many of them in the 200 km (120 mi) strip
around the border; according to Red Army directive, fuel, equipment,
railroad cars, etc. were similarly concentrated there…. Enormous
Soviet forces were massed behind the western border in case the Germans
did attack.

However, these forces were very vulnerable due to changes in the
tactical doctrine of the Red Army. In 1938, it had adopted, on the
instigation of General Pavlov, a standard linear defence tactic on a
line with other nations. Infantry divisions, reinforced by an organic
tank component, would be dug in to form heavily fortified zones. Then
came the shock of the Fall of France. The French Army, considered the
strongest in the world, was defeated in a mere six weeks. Soviet
analysis of events, based on incomplete information, concluded that the
collapse of the French was caused by a reliance on linear defence and a
lack of armored reserves. The Soviets decided not to repeat these
mistakes. Instead of digging in for linear defence, the infantry
divisions would henceforth be concentrated in large formations. Most
tanks would also be concentrated into 29 mechanized corps, each with
over 1031 tanks.

If Suvorov is right (and Hassell wrong), it is not hard to see
the reality behind this rather transparent cover story. “Enormous
Soviet forces were massed behind the western border in case the Germans
did attack.” Certainly, the German invasion forces were massed
into large formations of mechanized corps. Had the Soviets thrown the
first punch (as Suvorov
points out), the
German panzer spearheads would have been no less defenseless.

The student of history is also suspicious when he sees multiple,
contradictory explanations of the same phenomenon. Stalin trusted
Hitler, except that he didn’t trust Hitler. So he prepared his defenses,
but he prepared them wrong. He abandoned his linear defenses, one year
after having his ass beaten black and blue by the
Mannerheim Line. Instead, he moved the Red Army up to the border and organized it into
offensive formations, strictly for counterattacking of course.

The task of history is the comparison of alternate pictures. Why do I
believe in the consensus explanation of the Holocaust? Because I cannot
form a picture of the 1940s in which the Jews of Central Europe simply
disappear, and nobody explains where and why they went. If the Holocaust
revisionists of the world stopped playing “if the glove doesn’t fit,
you must acquit,” and spent a tenth of the time explaining what
happened to the shtetl Jews who weren’t gassed by the SS, they
might have a chance of convincing me. If they could, wouldn’t they? Whereas, in my true history which contains the Holocaust, all the pieces
seem to fit together.

The story of Stalin the innocent, peace-loving klutz, as purveyed by
Stalin, fits awkwardly at best. The story of Stalin who was about to
launch a blitzkrieg against the Third Reich fits quite well. Of course,
this would have been a military secret at the time, and of course
military secrets remain military secrets by default. Thus, the secrets
of 1941 remain controversies in 2010. The 20th century: still
mysterious, comrades.

What do we learn from Hassell here? Hassell does not believe in Stalin’s
invasion. He doesn’t believe in Katyn, either. Moreover, by his
disbelief, he illustrates the fact that officials of the Third Reich
generally did believe in Stalin’s invasion. It was not just the
Nazi line, though it was the Nazi line; it was also the confidential,
cocktail-party truth. “But it would be terrible if you were right!”

To non-Anglophile Germans, the reality of 1941 was that Hitler, who had
always argued against a two-front war, invaded the Soviet Union as a
desperate act of self-defense against the Bolshevik hordes. Who, when
they got into Europe, behaved almost precisely as Hitler predicted. Could it be true? My magic 8-ball says: more likely than not. A very
different history, comrades.

The most interesting question about the hypothetical Soviet invasion of
Europe, one I have never seen broached, is what FDR knew. Certainly, he
would have welcomed such an attack. If one was scheduled, did Harry
Hopkins know about it? Was it planned, even, in Washington? Was the
entire Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact a gambit to set up this endgame? Certainly, FDR had no qualms about his sponsorship of Stalin in any
other context.

The possibility is not at all unthinkable. It is neither beyond the
intellectual or practical capacity of the actors, nor outside their
moral horizons, nor would have been disclosed by now if true. In fact,
such an arrangement might never have been committed to paper—much as
Hitler never put an order for the Holocaust on paper. We might never
know. The 20th century: still mysterious.

But still, there is more. March 29, 1943, p. 296:

Meanwhile, Mr. Wallace, Vice-President of the United States, made his
address on the three ideologies. The “Christian-democratic” view had
to prevail over the “Prussian-militaristic” view (in spite of its
unquestionable qualities which were used to advance a wrong purpose). The third ideology, the “Marxist,” would have to be rejected. Except
for the usual identification of Hitlerism and Prussianism (which I
reject), the speech shows the deep-seated differences between the
eastern and western allies, and indicates what opportunities there would
be for a different German regime.

In this connection Gerstenmeier had a highly interesting conversation in
Sweden with clergymen and ——- about the secret Germany. The same
question always comes from abroad: “Is there a secret Germany? Why does
it put up with all that goes on?”

On the occasion of Wallace’s speech, the Neue Züricher Zeitung
for the first time takes sides unmistakably with Germany’s enemies. A
speech by the Turkish Prime Minister is clearly pro-Anglo-Saxon.

A grotesque byplay: Old Prince Chigi, Italian and fascist, visits the
American Archbishop Spellman in Vatican City in order to confer on him
the Cross of the Order of Malta (certainly not without Mussolini’s
permission!) The Osservatore Romano treats bolshevism as a thing
that must be completely rejected, but emphasizes that it is an
indigenous European growth which by chance has matured in one country
(Russia). Consequently there was no reason for the Pope to take sides
against this nation.

We see clearly how Hassell’s reliability diminishes as we move away from
Berlin. Of all figures in the world, he has just allowed Henry
Wallace to convince him that there is a fundamental difference between
Eastern and Western Allies—between communism and liberalism.

Henry Wallace, of
course, was perhaps America’s most distinguished anti-communists of the
’40s. Wallace, who later became one of Alger Hiss’s principal
persecutors, would later be influential in founding the John Birch
Society, and most famously charged that President Eisenhower was
secretly in cahoots with the Bolsheviks… oh, sorry! I was
thinking of
Robert Welch.

In 1950, when North Korea invaded South Korea, Wallace broke with the
Progressives and backed the U.S.-led war effort in the Korean War. In
1952, Wallace published Where I Was Wrong, in which he explained
that his seemingly-trusting stance toward the Soviet Union and Joseph
Stalin stemmed from inadequate information about Stalin’s excesses and
that he, too, now considered himself an anti-Communist. He…
advocated the re-election of President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956.

This is the great thing about the Cold War. Any liberal, even Henry
Wallace, can be an anti-communist at any time. He can be a communist,
then an anti-communist, then a Communist again, then an anti-communist
again. In a word, he’s pragmatic. He is not to be confused, of course,
with a dogmatic red-baiting paranoid fanatic—like Robert Welch. Who
thought Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist. But how could Dwight D.
Eisenhower be a communist, when he was supported by a famous
anti-communist—like Henry Wallace?

Thus the student of history finds himself confronted with two kinds of
anti-communist: the Henry Wallace kind and the Robert Welch kind. They
do not appear to much associate with each other. If Robert Welch is an
anti-communist, what is Henry Wallace? The short answer is: a liberal. And what is the relationship between liberalism and communism? Well,
whatever it is, simple it ain’t.

The division between Henry Wallace and Joseph Stalin, assuming for
purposes of argument its reality, is a classic case of sectarian
conflict on the left. Leftism is riddled with sects; Trotskyists versus
Stalinists versus Maoists, and the like. There is no denying that
American liberalism was broadly allied with Moscow in 1944, and broadly
in conflict with Moscow in 1948. This is best seen as a sectarian schism
in a single church; the “Cold War” is not an existential conflict of
Left and Right, like the war on Hitler, but a fracture in a single
global movement. As we speak of the
Sino-Soviet
split, we might speak of the “Anglo-Soviet split.”

This is certainly not a point of view that leads us to agree with
Hassell’s Osservatore Romano, in its judgment that Bolshevism is
“an indigenous European growth which by chance has matured in one
country (Russia).” The opposite hypothesis is suggested: that
Bolshevism is an exotic, non-European growth. I.e., an American growth. I.e., when America infects Russia with liberalism, the spore (lacking
native enemies) grows into its malign form of Bolshevism. Contra
Hassell, democracy and communism are two forms of the same disease.

This explanation of the 20th century is held by… no one. Well,
hardly anyone.Stanislav
Mishin might give it the time of day. And, of course, it also reminds
us of Hitler’s
explanation—but without that awful, anti-Semitic edge.

In truth, when we see that even a sophisticate like Hassell understands
America so poorly that he can fall for Henry Wallace as a staunch
anti-Communist, we find it easier to explain if not excuse Hitler. How
on earth was Hitler to know that FDR wasn’t a puppet of the
Elders of Zion? Hassell was a jet-setter avant la lettre, comfortable in
all European capitals; Hitler was a rube, who had never been west of
Ypres. What basis would he have for distinguishing the YMCA from the
Elders of Zion, messianic Protestantism from messianic Judaism,
liberalism from freemasonry, Anglophilia from Hebrolatry? Zero.

And certainly, the Allies spared little effort in reinforcing his fears. Whatever the psychological motivation for his merciless Teutophobia,
FDR’s forces displayed exactly the same ruthlessness and energy we’d
expect if the Elders of Zion were out to conquer the world and Germany
had just pissed in their Cheerios. Again: how was Hitler to know he
wasn’t fighting a race war against the Jews? Who should he have
asked?

If we accept this theory, the entire basis of the July 20 rebellion,
which postulated that Germany would continue to fight for an honorable
peace and resist Bolshevism, was entirely flawed. If Tom Cruise had
blown up Hitler, the Third Reich would have suffered exactly the fate of
Badoglio’s Italy (or, for that matter, Ebert’s Germany). Within days,
weeks or hours, peace negotiations would instantly have morphed into
conditional surrender, which would have morphed into unconditional
surrender. Certainly by 1944, insane Nazi fanaticism was the only thing
that could have kept Germany fighting.

And the future of a defeated Germany? Again, it’s hard not to think that
Hitler’s predictions of 2010 might be more accurate than Hassell’s. The
differences between the EU and the late USSR are increasingly difficult
to define. It appears that revolutionary communism and peaceful
liberalism are very different roads to a very similar destination—a
sort of Western Brezhnevism. And isn’t it the goal, not the methods,
that define the ideology? By this standards, you will search hard for
any definition of the differences.

Which leads us to the most provocative section of the Hassell quote
above:

The same question always comes from abroad: “Is there a secret Germany? Why does it put up with all that goes on?”

“Is there a secret Germany?” Now, imagine this question is coming
from, say, Sweden. If you were from Sweden, under what condition would
this be a natural question? If there was a “secret Sweden?” Or if
there was no “secret Sweden?”

Suppose you were from a country where there were prostitutes, and you
visit Germany. You might ask: “are there German prostitutes?” This
would be a very natural question. If you were from a country with
no prostitutes, however, it would be an unusual question.

Sweden, of course, is a minor case of “abroad.” What Hassell really
means by “abroad” is the Anglophile world—the world Nazi Germany is
rebelling against. Thus, when interlocutors from England and America ask
about the “secret Germany,” we can at the very least suspect the
existence of a “secret England” and a “secret America.”

Conspiracy theorists unite! Which leads us to the famous
Carroll Quigley
quote:

The radical Right version of these events as written up by
John T. Flynn,
Freda Utley, and
others, was even more remote from the truth than were
Budenz’s or
Bentley’s
versions, although it had a tremendous impact on American opinion and
American relations with other countries in the years 1947–1955. This
radical Right fairy tale, which is now an accepted folk myth in many
groups in America, pictured the recent history of the United States, in
regard to domestic reform and in foreign affairs, as a well-organized
plot by extreme Left-wing elements, operating from the White House
itself and controlling all the chief avenues of publicity in the United
States, to destroy the American way of life, based on private
enterprise, laissez faire, and isolationism, in behalf of alien
ideologies of Russian Socialism and British cosmopolitanism (or
internationalism). This plot, if we are to believe the myth, worked
through such avenues of publicity as The New York Times and the Harold
Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor and the Washington Post, the
Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Magazine and had at its core the wild-eyed
and bushy-haired theoreticians of Socialist Harvard and the London
School of Economics. It was determined to bring the United States into
World War II on the side of England (Roosevelt’s first love) and Soviet
Russia (his second love) in order to destroy every finer element of
American life and, as part of this consciously planned scheme, invited
Japan to attack Pearl Harbor, and destroyed Chiang Kai-shek, all the
while undermining America’s real strength by excessive spending and
unbalanced budgets.

This myth, like all fables, does in fact have a modicum of truth. There
does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international
anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the
radical Right believes the communists act. In fact, this network, which
we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to
cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups and frequently does
so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it
for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960’s,
to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to
most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to
many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently,
to a few of its policies….but in general my chief difference of
opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in
history is significant enough to be known.

Please do not run out and buy a copy of
Tragedy
& Hope on the basis of this quote. Quigley is in fact turgid and quite
unreadable, and not at all informative. You would do much better to read
Flynn,
Utley and
Budenz.

Quigley’s first paragraph above is in fact more or less the truth about
the 1940s, although stated in pejorative terms to discredit itself. Connoisseurs of 20th-century propaganda will be very familiar with this
technique. Straight-up ridicule is the propaganda equivalent of running
the ball up the middle: it’s a play you can call when you can’t think of
any other play. Think of all the proposition that ordinary propaganda
consumers believe, for no other reason but that they consider the
converse ridiculous. Or possibly evil. Or maybe just insane.

I personally have read more 20th-century anti-communist
writing—genuine anti-communist writing, not Henry Wallace
anti-communist writing—than, perhaps, any person living. If you own a
book published between 1945 and 1975 by Devin-Adair or Western Islands
(publishing arm of the JBS) or the old Regnery or Arlington House, the
odds are at least 50–50 I’ve read it. This material is hard to find, in
the sense that you are unlikely to find it unless you look for it; but
fortunately, a lot of it was printed, so it tends to be quite cheap
used. The Western Islands “Dozen Candles” paperback box set, with
covers by Peppino Rizzuto, is a particular favorite. After the ’70s, the
quality of anti-communist writing deteriorates sharply. The better
material is almost invariably the product of a prewar education.

My personal prediction is that all writing in English not part of
the anti-communist tradition will eventually, however long it takes, be
discarded and left to specialists. We can see this process clearly in
the fall of Nazism and, somewhat less clearly, Bolshevism. The path of
intellectual history, sub specie aeternitatis, flows through the
honest and independent and the successful careerists. As Edith Hamilton
said to Freda Utley: “don’t expect the material rewards of
unrighteousness, while engaged in the pursuit of truth.” The canon will
one day be reconstructed, and a lot of reconstructing it will take.

We may still criticize the anti-communist tradition, however, even in
its golden age. While generally engaged in the pursuit of truth,
American anti-communism remained a democratic endeavor. It could not
avoid seeking power through control over public opinion. Thus it was
led, if unconsciously, to tell Americans what they wanted to hear—and
not what they didn’t.

What is the truth about the “secret America?” The truth, which no one
wanted or wants to hear, is that
communism
is as American as apple pie. Communism is a form of American
liberalism, or progressivism. It is not, as so many anti-communists
liked to suggest, an exotic foreign import. When imported from exotic
lands, it’s because we exported it there in the first place. In America
it may speak with a Russian accent; in Russia, it speaks with an
American accent.

By the 1930s, communism with a strong Protestant flavor had become the
dominant religion of American high society—the wealthiest and most
fashionable Americans. But it was not yet the dominant religion of the
American population, and America was a democracy. Thus the strong flavor
of secrecy and intrigue, often frankly anti-democratic, that we find in
the progressives of the early 20th century.

With a figure like
Colonel House, for
instance, the conspiracy theorist cannot find much else to ask for. Was
Colonel House a free agent? Or did he report to some committee of
bankers? How would we ever know? Frankly, in the Colonel’s world, the
Elders of Zion hardly seem necessary.

Thus, as Quigley himself pointed out, the crusade of anti-communism was
doomed from the beginning. Rather than attacking a foreign infection,
anti-communism was attacking the host: the American social
establishment. For this purpose it was a little short of lymphocytes. No
surprise, thus, that it should fail and be consigned to historical
ignominy.

Moreover, this social mismatch has been entirely rectified. What the
bohemians of Greenwich Village believed in 1923, everyone in America
(and the world) believes now. The beliefs of an ordinary Calvin Coolidge
voter would strike the ordinary John McCain voter as outlandish,
ridiculous, insane, and often downright evil. America has no
surviving intellectual tradition besides progressivism—which is
no more than a synonym for communism. (My own grandparents, lifelong
CPUSA members, used “progressive” as a codeword all their lives.) Communism is as American as apple pie, and America today is a completely
communist country. As Garet Garett put it 70 years ago,
the revolution
was.

So when we read Hassell and think, “is there a secret America?”, the
answer is: yes. There was a secret America. There was also a
secret Germany, and those of its conspirators who were not shot in ’44
and ’45 later became its rulers—its establishment. It is no secret
that the governing classes of 2010 are not terribly concerned with
nations and nationality. Culturally, they are all descendants of the
fashionable conspiracies of the early 20th century—Quigley’s Round
Table Group, the
Coefficients,
the Fabians, the
Inquiry, and
so on, down to our own dear
CFR. Even the CFR, as late
as the ’50s, retained a certain “Fight Club” mystique. Now, even the
dogs in the street know all about it. The Hassells of the world, and
there were some in every country, were the ancestors of the global
governing establishment of our own era. Secrets it retains, but its
existence is not among them.

The liberal regimes of the early 21st century still keep secrets. But
they no longer can be classified as conspiracies. With the elimination
of any serious competition, they have become bureaucracies. By
definition, any regime is a conspiracy in its youth and a bureaucracy in
its maturity. Was the collaboration of the New Deal state, USG 4, with
Stalin morally culpable? Certainly. Was it secretive? It was extremely
secretive. Do some of those secrets repose still in its files? Are new
diplomatic secrets born every day? Of course they are.

But by the 1950s, this conspiracy was also quite firmly in
charge. It could no longer be described as a conspiracy. A conspiracy
is something that hides, that sneaks, that can be smashed by a superior
establishment. After World War II, the “secret America” was the
establishment itself—a bureaucracy.

The match is not to be mistaken for the fire. It may even continue
burning along with it. Once the house is on fire, however, you can’t put
it out by putting out the match. Hence the problem with conspiracy
theory. Even when its history is 100% true, its relevance is deceptive. Our New World Order may have been founded by the YMCA, but abolishing
the YMCA is no longer sufficient to abolish the New World Order.

For the American bureaucracy, the attempts of the “McCarthyist” period
to purge Washington of communists was as pointless as it was
painful—so what if high civil servants had collaborated with Stalin? Even if Stalin was evil? If anyone was guilty, everyone was guilty. Did
McCarthy have another State Department to replace the one we had? If
not, what was the point? When Dean Acheson refused to “turn his back”
on Alger Hiss, I’m quite confident that it was because he knew Hiss had
informal, high-level authorization for every time he slept with Moscow. If so, Hiss was punished for his loyalty; he was purged because he
refused to rat on his “secret America.”

So what we see in American anti-communism is an attempt to produce
salt-free salt. And, fundamentally, a cop-out. If we take communism as
an exotic pest, an intruder into the American myth, Americans can
restore Americanism simply by expelling communism.

But if communism—which killed 100 million people, at least, and is
nowhere near dead—is fundamentally American? We face a far more
difficult question: the question of national guilt. Real guilt;
for the American communist excels at nothing so much as inventing false
crimes to repent for, typically the crime of not being communist enough. He thereby avoids any repentance for his actual offenses.

And Americans of both sides must experience this national guilt, exactly
as all Germans have. For the Germans either supported Hitler, or did not
oppose him enough to get the job done. Likewise, Americans of the left
supported and exported communism; Americans of the right, due to their
failure to truly search their consciences, carped at, complained, and
tolerated it.

Or if they did something, what was the result? Nothing. What happened to
American anti-communists? They lost. Where can I find a street named
after Robert Welch? Freda Utley? Louis Budenz? Nowhere, which is a
pretty good sign that a figure has been defeated. Instead, the
historical mainstream runs straight through the anti-anti-communists:
the Henry Wallaces. (Indeed, Henry Wallace was finally elected in 2008.)

So, for failing, the American right is just as guilty as the left. If
they were bound to fail, should they have fought at all? And they
failed, we see, because they fooled themselves and those they wrote for. Without these enemies, the “secret America” might have found it easier
to come to its senses. In statecraft, as
Fouché put it, a
crime can be worse than a mistake.

This is the 20th century in a nutshell: behind the secrets, unspeakably
vile in every way. All are guilty; the entire era is damned. No faction
finds any redemption. There is only the mystery of human life, which by
some miracle survived and for the moment continues.